1. The Appearance of Christ in the Etheric

Looking far back into human evolution, we see that there is a certain moment after which humanity may be said to be descending even further from its fellowship with the spiritual world and entering more and more into the material world. Although the following image has its material side, we may nevertheless use it here: man was at one time a companion of spiritual beings, his spirit dwelt within the spiritual world and, by reason of the fact that he dwelt in the spiritual world, he was a son of the gods. What constituted this constantly reincarnating soul, however, participated increasingly in the outer world. The son of the gods was then within man, who took delight in the daughters of the earth, that is, in those souls who had sympathy for the physical world. This, in turn, means that the human spirit, who had previously been permeated by divine spirituality, sank down into the physical world of the senses. He became the mate of the intellect, which is bound to the brain and which entangled him in the sense world. Now this spirit must find the path by which he descended and, climbing upward again, become once more the son of the gods. The son of man, which he has become, would perish here below in the physical world if he were not to ascend once more as son of man to the divine beings, to the light of the spiritual world, if he were not in the future to find delight in the daughters of the gods. It was necessary for the evolution of humanity that the sons of gods should unite with the daughters of men, with the souls that were fettered to the physical world, in order that, as son of man, the human being would learn to master the physical plane. It is necessary for the human being of the future, however, that, as the son of man, he shall find delight in the daughters of the gods, in the divine-spiritual light of wisdom with which he must unite himself in order to rise once again into the world of the gods.